Palaeo what?

Having worked as an archaeologist for over a decade now, I sometimes forget that a lot of people are not aware of what it is archaeologists actually do. There is sometimes confusion between archaeology (studying humans in the past) and palaeontology (studying the stuff that came before humans). There can be a bit of overlap between the two. Some palaeontologists study fossils of the hominids that came before modern humans. Neanderthals for example are one of the earlier hominids, and the ones that most people have heard of. There was a period when modern humans and other hominids overlapped, so you can get palaeontologists and archaeologists working on similar things.

It's a bit of a running joke in archaeology, that the first thing you get asked about is dinosaurs, when in fact the dinosaurs died out 66 million years ago (66,000,000). Archaeology begins 3.3 million years ago, when the first tool using hominids appeared. Modern humans did not appear until roughly 200,000 years ago, in the middle Palaeolithic. So studying dinosaurs very firmly falls under palaeontology, not archaeology! When it comes to palaeodiet in the fitness community, I've come across several blogs which make jokes about cavemen having to run away from dinosaurs. Maybe it's the fault of the Flintstones. Humans and dinosaurs have never co-existed I'm afraid.

Palaeontology and palaeodiet sound similar because 'palaeo' comes from the Greek word 'palaios' meaning old or ancient. So the Palaeolithic means old Stone Age. When you look at a timescale showing the history of life on Earth, by far the biggest span of time falls under palaeontology. We humans have been around for a relatively short time. The popular use of palaeodiet refers to a supposed 'palaeolithic diet', but this period of human history actually covers a very long time span (about 2.5 million years) and a lot of dietary changes.

The Palaeolithic period (lasted for such a long time it is divided up into 3 parts, the early, middle and late Palaeolithic) becomes the Mesolithic (middle Stone Age). This is the transition between the Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers and the Neolithic (new Stone Age), when people became sedentary. So if you talk about the early Palaeolithic, you are actually saying the 'early early Stone Age'.

To confuse things further, archaeologists studying ancient diets in any archaeological period, from the Palaeolithic to the Romans are said to study palaeodiet! By the time we get to the medieval period, the use of 'palaeodiet' shifts to just 'diet'. It's just not that ancient by this point. This is of course a generalisation - the shift from being mobile hunter-gatherers to settled farmers didn't happen everywhere in the world, and certainly not all at the same time. And in some cases archaeologists have found evidence of Palaeolithic hunter gatherer cultures building houses. Even when people became settled and started farming, they often still hunted as well. This is why studying palaeodiet is so fascinating - humans are a diverse lot. How and why have we changed our dietary habits?  How this linked in with other cultural changes? How does this vary in different parts of the world and why?